Opzi demos Quora-like Q&A platform for businesses

September 27, 2010 6:09 PMMatthew Lynley

Opzi, which provides a question-and-answer platform similar to Quora for enterprise customers, is betting that companies relying on email and services like Salesforce’s Chatter for quick answers have exhausted employees to the point of jumping on board the service. Opzi founder Euwyn Poon demoed the product at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today.

The platform serves as a way for employees to ask and answer questions, providing a company with a crowd-sourced FAQ for how to run the business or tackle technical problems any employee might run into. Users log in with a corporate email address and search for answers using keywords. Users can also email questions to be answered directly by other members of the Q&A service. Those answers will then also be distributed through email.

Poon said Opzi is essentially trying a different kind of enterprise search by giving people a search engine that helps them “solve a problem” rather than scour databases for anything along the lines of previously checked-in code or legal documents. Enterprise search is a bit of a different ball game from regular internet search, as most of the data is stored in emails and other tough-to-access places. By throwing all the information into a platform, Opzigives companies a quick reference guide and help employees sidestep the search process altogether.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-company has so far raised $1 million from a number of angel investors including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Paul Buchheit, Fritz Lanman and Raymond Tonsing, according to TechCrunch.